2.7 introduced memoryview, and there are a slew of C API routines to interact with it ...

as for shared memory, have you tried just mmap'ing the node from /dev/shm ?

Aha! That sounds like just the ticket. I hope it's easy to use. A million thank-you's, and a Salami.

EDIT: I just saw your edit. That's what I'm doing --- shm_open(), ftruncate(), then mmap(). A little annoying that it doesn't automatically kill the shared memory when the program terminates, but still...

It's pretty slick, and I've had good results using it in conjunction with a C program that generates data.